


Asgard I Have Called Home

by Barkour



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Missing Scene, Slap Slap Kiss, still in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-28
Updated: 2017-11-28
Packaged: 2019-02-08 01:39:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12853962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: Sif, appointed guardian of Midgard, receives a late night visit from an ex she thought dead.





	Asgard I Have Called Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glamafonic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glamafonic/gifts).



> A sort of continuation to [Witness Him](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12836256). So there's a mention of Thor/Hulk here. (Don't @ me.)
> 
> I forgot, again, to sign up for the Sif/Loki holiday exchange, and so I demanded My Darling Love, Rawles, grant me four Sif/Loki prompts to fulfill. She asked for the drunk call to Loki's ex (Sif) teased in the aforementioned fic. 
> 
> This turned out fairly sad but hey, I'm sure I'll write a third thing to make it happier.
> 
> Content warning at the end.

She had gone mad. Why else should Loki, dead these four years, spill drunkenly forth out of the television set? Sif, fresh come of the shower, emerged in briefs and a low-cut shirt that said PHYSICISTS DO IT ON THE EVENT HORIZON (a joke gift from the lady Darcy) to find Loki struggling to pull his second foot free of the static broadcast.

She said, “Loki,” in a voice she had never before heard.

He fell shoulder first onto the bare wood boards and there groaned. Planting a bare hand on the coffee table, he shoved himself to his knees and looked blearily at her.

“Sif,” he said.

A spirit, she thought. A wraith. The tableau had the ambiance of the sort of dream that verged on shifting to a nightmare: the thing both longed for and most feared, the peculiarity of Loki so gracelessly exposed in her Detroit apartment, the flickering of the television set and the pale black-blue ghosts it made of his high cheekbones.

“You aren’t real,” she said and then, with growing anger, she said, “How dare you wear his face! Grave-clinger!” and she marched to the little hall closet where she kept all her swords, extendable glaives, assorted other polearms, etc. 

He was there as she made to haul the door open, landing hard against the door so that it slammed into the jamb and she swore at Loki, only it was not Loki for it could not be Loki, as Loki had died.

“Sif,” said Loki, drawing out the sibilant with the drunk’s grace even as he endeavored to sound put upon. “It is me. Well and truly. I’m alive.”

He fumbled for her hand, to press it to his breast. Sif snatched her hand from his long fingers and punched the shade’s jaw. 

“I will not be deceived by some low, crawling thing,” she said snarlingly through her teeth. “Loki is dead, twice over—”

“Oh, for shit’s sake,” said Loki, “you make it sound like a habit.”

“Twice now I have mourned him, and the dead would not give him up again to torment me so!”

He rolled his eyes and huffed, and that might have convinced her had he not then grabbed her by her shoulders and drawn her near and kissed her bruisingly across the mouth. His lips were ever thin, his teeth hard; he sucked deeply of her lip and then slid open-mouthed from her, his breath spilling hot across her lips and his black lashes low across his eyes.

She struck him again. Loki said, “Ow,” and fell to his back.

Sif shouted, “You thrice damned bastard son of a troll!” and she kicked at him for good measure. Rolling from her foot, he grabbed at her ankle and then her calf and yanked her down to wrestle with him on the floor.

“How many times must I mourn you!” He pulled cruelly on her hair so her scalp burned and she screamed. She bit at his mealy worm-thin lips with savagery. “Liar’s tongue, bastard’s breath—”

She could not tell if she wanted to rip the every hair from his head or to kiss him so thoroughly that she became as fool drunk as he. Ever had it been so between them. Alive, alive, alive, her heart sang, and even so she wanted to put her hands on his neck and choke that very life out of him.

He’d a hand down the front of that loose-cut shirt, cupping her bare breast in his palm and only this, as if her bosom was a great comfort to him. Her thigh was wedged between his legs. She withdrew from the kiss, pulling out a wretched sort of moan from his mouth as she did so, and a wetness of skin as their lips parted.

Sif knotted a hand in the collar of his drunkly rumpled white tunic and shook him.

“I should drag you before Odin Allfather myself!”

Loki winced and then he seemed to still beneath her in that way he had of stilling so it was though he had never moved before, not as stone but like as frost crept upon the face of stone.

“Odin is dead,” said Loki. 

So, too, was Sif made still. Her other hand settled palm to his shoulder. That feeling of having woken into a dream returned to her.

“Do not lie to me,” said Sif.

He made visible effort to focus, though the drink did not abet, and placing a hand over her hand, Loki said “He is dead,” and swallowing so that the jutting knob in his throat pulled, he said too, “as is Asgard.”

Unreality swelled around Sif; then she threw it from her.

Into his face she said again with her teeth exposed as the bones they were: “Do not! Do not lie to me!”

He was dead! She had seen the grief heavy on Thor. He was dead but had Loki not known many a dark trick? Had he not studied foul arts? Could he not send a whisper of a shade out to foul the mind?

“Asgard cannot be dead,” she said. “That ruin is impossible.”

“Only the place is dead, not the people,” said Loki. “This is an important distinction newly shared with me by my brother.

“It was Ragnarok,” he said, “and it’s a very long story if you would just please listen instead of breaking my nose.”

“Nothing of you is true.” She shifted her weight to her knees and rose. “Why would Odin not have recalled me? If it was truly the end of things?”

Loki closed his eyes and banged the back of his head against the floor. The man who lived downstairs was shouting. Loki said, “I _know_ , would you _shut it_?” and the man went suddenly silent.

She knew of no ghosts that could work such magic in such a way, with word and with will.

“You’re real,” she said.

“Yes,” said Loki. “I told you so.”

“You’re real, and—”

He grimaced and then wincingly opened his eyes. Sif turned her head just so to narrow her eyes sidelong at him. She knew that look on him.

“There’s this fantastic new fashion I’m trying out,” said Loki. “I tell the truth, and I confess all my crimes, and I try, I really do, to be more than just a charming wellspring of mischief. Which is to say— Don’t make that face at me, Sif.”

“I’m not making a face,” she said.

“You’re making a face, and it’s the muling face,” said Loki.

“Is it the one that says I’m thinking of punching you in the back of your neck?”

“Aren’t we a little old for those schoolyard jokes?”

Sif grabbed him by the collar and hefted him half-off the floor. His long and spiderish legs remained tangled out beneath her.

“Who said it was a joke?”

He exhaled sharply through his nose and said, “If you’re going to be a brute anyway,” and then it was the Allfather she held so tightly at the throat. 

Odin’s deep and haggard voice said, “I charged you with protecting Midgard, so that you wouldn’t spoil everything for me,” and she dropped him, Loki, not Odin at all. 

“You usurped the king.” In the same moment that she spoke it occurred to her and so in the next she said, “King-slayer.” Twice over, she thought. 

Loki held a hand between them. He began to squirm up the hallway on his back but she followed him and straddled him between her legs. 

“I did not kill Odin,” said Loki, “he made a choice of his own—”

“To die by his hand or by your hand?”

He shouted, “I did not kill my father!”

Sif shouted back at him. “You killed one father, why not the other!”

He caught her fists as they rose and he held her, somehow, like so, with his fingers biting into her knuckles like ice.

“Do you really think so little of me?”

“I don’t know what to think of you!” she roared. She tightened her knees about his waist, pinning him under her weight though he continued to hold her trembling arms upright. “Dead! Alive! A liar! Always a liar! What goodness you must have once had in you,” said Sif, gone throaty with emotion though she hated how it thickened in her throat, “for you to be so wicked to me now. Ragnarok, Loki?”

She was splintering as like a glass broken in a dream. 

“Ragnarok?” she repeated. “The death of Asgard?”

Loki’s eyes were fixed on her. He was unblinking, black-pupiled, feverish with the need to be believed. How the fuck could she believe him?

“They’re dead,” he said. “All of them. The legions. The old generals. The warriors three.”

“My brother?”

“Heimdall has lived. Thor,” said Loki. “He found a gods own valkyrie in the ass-pit of the universe—”

She broke free of his grip and once, twice pounded each fist on his chest. Loki, over-lean jaw set, tipped his chin up and let her strike him. 

“Asgard has fallen!” she shouted. “All our warriors, our brave and beautiful soldiers—We were meant to ride together.”

“But you,” said Loki, rising to his elbows and clutching at her elbows as he did so. His brow butted her own, lowered. “You’re alive.” He said it as she had felt it in that shivering sliver of a moment: alive! alive! 

She shook her head. “No. No. I was not meant to be here, on Midgard, while the souls of Asgard were slaughtered—”

“But you’re alive!” It was a mania on him, how he clutched at her, how he rose as she seemed to sink. “Oh, Sif, you’re _alive_.”

“How dare you take my death from me!”

They fought again then, there in the dark of her squalid apartment, that four room thing of wood and red brick where she had waited out three and a half years for Odin to call her once more to defend Asgard, that golden city, the honeyed land of her mothers. 

She wept in her rage, that vast impotency. 

He caught her face again in his long hands, his fingers pressing dark folds of her hair like muffling pads to her ears. That sharp-lined coldness had come to his features. How his fingers bit. She loathed him most of all for not fighting properly against her.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Asgard still lives in its people. And you will live too.”

She swallowed, choking on the salt and on the hate.

“Do you think me to believe that you sent me to rot on Midgard so I would survive Ragnarok?”

“It doesn’t matter why I sent you,” he said.

Sif hefted her own chin. She spat it into his face. 

“You sent me because you’re a coward. And you knew that I would know you for your self because I have always known you, Loki. No matter what guise you might wear.”

He leaned into her and kissed her, efficient and brutally so. Sif bit his lip so it bled. The blood moved between their lips, flatly joined and then wetly. 

“It kept you alive.”

“It was not your choice to make,” she said lowly. “How I should live or if I should die.”

Loki looked unwaveringly back at her. 

“I’m finding there’s a great many things I can live with,” he said. “This one will be easy.”

The touching of his hands upon her cheeks had gentled. His fingers tightened once more. She grasped a wrist in her hand and held it, tightly so she felt the bones of his hard-muscled wrist against the fat muscle of her palm.

How could she make words of any of it? She was not given to ready speech. She had loved him and he had died then he had resurrected and she had despised him and he had died once more, and now Loki lived and he was breathing beneath her and his cool hands were upon her face and his cool fingers wound through her hair; and Sif alone had languished uselessly upon the least of the realms as Ragnarok ate the gold city that had stood millions of years, billions of years, years beyond reckoning.

Tears stood hotly in her eyes. As yet drunk, Loki made some strange crooning sound and wiped with excessive care at her eyes with his thumbs. She squeezed shut her eyes against his touch and yet she let him touch her so. 

Sif could not comprehend the absence of Asgard without seeing upon her lids the spaces of it. The lake of her mothers! The training yards, the rings where she had proved the worth of her blood. The fire-spitting mountains and the old aqueducts. The library of countless realms where in their youth Loki had hid. 

She unwound herself from Loki and sat with her back to the corridor wall and a hand to cover her eyes from him. Asgard, Asgard. Fandral, Volstagg, grim Hogun. 

Fighting the weeping, she heard Loki sitting up with the clumsy deliberation of the drunk.

He said, roughly voiced, “There’s more.”

“What more could there be?”

“Eugh,” he said. “There’s actually quite a lot more. We had a sister, did you know that? Me and Thor. And Thor started a slave revolt on another planet. And,” said Loki, sounding doom, “my brother, our king, lays with the Hulk. Sexually.”

Sif ground her teeth. The old irritation was perhaps a relief. 

“Don’t make jokes at this time.”

“Fine, don’t believe me.” Most unbelievably, he sounded sulky, as though he had not just told her that all the lands of their youth were made to waste. “You never did anyway. Not unless Thor backed me up.”

“Are you serious?” she demanded. She dropped her hands. Her nose had begun to run. “You’re choosing now to have one of your idiotic jealous fits?”

“I have had—” He started to count his fingers then swiftly gave up. “Several trans-galactic sunrise bombers! So you’ll have to forgive me having emotions!”

“You think you have the right to emotions!”

“I lost Asgard, too!”

“You gave up Asgard!”

“Piss and shit!” said Loki. “I only faked my death for a greater purpose!”

“To usurp the Allfather and forestall the rightful heir!” 

She found she could very easily justify the work of rolling back on top of Loki and both slapping and kissing him.

“Well, he’s king now,” said Loki, running a hand through his unwashed hair, “and so you owe Thor oaths of fidelity—”

“Fealty,” said Sif wearily. 

“That’s what I said,” Loki snipped, “I’m the silvertongue and you’re the bash happy shield person.”

She kicked his foot. Loki kicked back at her. They each of them sighed.

“Thor is truly king.”

“Yes, and he has an eyepatch now.” He gestured to his own face. 

It was ludicrous. Everything of the last hour was absurdity. How could Asgard be gone? and yet she tasted the truth of it. Her sorrow and her anger had deadened some, though she could feel it throbbing hotly still in her breast. Sif knew it would not cease to burn her soon.

Loki looked at her with those dark eyes, those black lashes, his face drawn pale and old.

“Come with me, Sif,” he said softly. He held his bared hand out to her. 

She looked not to his hand, but at his dark eyes, so that they were staring at one another in a thin silence that pulled tight like a thread. Her face was wet; it itched. Her legs were yet naked. Her shirt was tugged to the left by his earlier ministrations. What did it matter? Whatever her garb she was ever Sif. 

“Then,” said Sif, “take me to my king, Loki,” and she laid her hand upon his hand. His fingers curled about the back of her hand. 

He stood. She stood with him. He led her to the television, that most Midgardian of things. 

As he made to step through, he said, “Sif. I have always loved you.”

Sif said, “I know.”

He smiled at her. The shape of it was a meager flex: a little thing without hope.

And I have loved you, she thought; but she could not say it yet, with Asgard dead between them. A people, he had said, and not a place. Grief was raw within her.

“Take me to Asgard,” said Sif. 

He took her.

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning: Sif and Loki fight physically as well as make out.


End file.
